After hours and days of frustration surrounding what should have been a very simple update from CS5 to CS5.5 on Mac OSX Lion (the latest version), I finally found a solution that makes perfect sense, and acutally works.

Here's my brief rant:

Adobe - you seriously need to work on your Tech Support. I've been a customer since Photoshop 2.0 and this is no bueno. Having someone tell me to create an Admin user account on my system with username "test" and "no password" is not helpful nor a good idea. Suggesting that I open up all my permissions to 777 also not a good idea. You need to seriously review your Tech Support team's scripts. Either way neither of these soltuions worked. Anyways I am done with my rant as I want this article to be HELPFUL TO PEOPLE who are super frustrated like me.

Here's what I discovered:

Here's the deal - if you upgrade to lion recently, you probably had an older version of a CS product on your computer. My guess is that when you migrated over some permissions got screwed up and the installer couldn't overrride the correct files it needs to because they are locked under a different user account (fair enough adobe, sounds more like Apple's problem). A friend suggested doing a hard reformat and reinstalling lion fresh via USB drive, probably a good idea but who's got the time?

So anyways, I kept getting a "pre-chrome" error in the debug output and kept seeing the "Accept Terms & Conditions" window no matter how many times I re-installed, wiped my files etc. Uber lame.

The solution turned out to be 'duh' simple from my PC user co-worker "Why don't you just install it under root access?" Ok, for those of you who don't know what root means, it basically just is the account who is authorized to write over all other user accounts. Apple turns this off by default because most people never need to user it. Unless you come across something like this...

Steps:

1. Uninstall anything you got going with CS, the more the better - you're going to reinstall it again anyways (just keep your serials around).

2. Consider downloading the CS Cleaner product that Adobe offers and wipe it all down (probably not required but can't hurt).

3. Follow these instructions on your Admin account to enable root temporarily: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1528 (BTW the Edit one is hard to find, they mean the acutal Edit menu on the top of the screen).

4. Install your CS 5.5.

5. This one is IMPORTANT - when it asks you to authenticate use your ROOT login and password, not your normal one. This grants the installer the abililty to write over other files.

6. Finish the install, check it out. If it worked you probably want to de-activate the root login for safety's sake.

gdoddsdesign thank you for the great tips I am sure this will help other users within the forum. You may still want to keep an eye on your administrator group permissions. If you had to go to root to resolve the issue, and even the newly created User account had compromised permissions, then there could still be some problems out there.

Many times though once software is installed under a root user it will continue to work without any additional modifications needed on the administrator account.

I also really like the tip about disabling root user at the end btw. Often users and technicians get so excited that the issue is solved they can forget this step.